Book 315: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough." 

Dates read: May 11-15, 2019

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize, The New York Times best-seller

I grew up in an entirely female household. My mother single parented my sister and I. She had serious boyfriends every now and again, but it was almost always just the three of us. Perhaps it's understandable, then, why I have always favored books by or about women. I know what a femininity crisis looks like, feels like. Men and their concerns have tended to feel slightly alien, like something to study that I'll never be able to fully comprehend.

To say that Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is testosterone-heavy is an understatement. It's a profoundly masculine piece of work. The book tells the life story of Oscar (whose real surname is not "Wao", a mocking mispronunciation of "Wilde", but rather "De Leon"), who is born into a Dominican family and grows up in New Jersey with his mother Hypatia and sister Lola, and is dead by his mid-twenties. Whether that death was avoidable, or whether it's the result of a fuku, a curse, on the De Leon family, whose history is explored in-depth along with that of the Dominican Republic as a whole, is left up to the reader to decide.

Starting when he's a child, the only thing in life Oscar wants is a girlfriend. Not only does he feel pressure to live up to a machismo Dominican ideal, he's the kind of guy that thinks he's in love if a girl smiles at him on the street. Unfortunately for Oscar, he's overweight, awkward, and a big science fiction nerd. This does not render him attractive to most of the girls he knows. The situation does not improve when he goes to college, where he briefly rooms with Yunior, his sister's boyfriend and the narrator of the story. Profoundly depressed, he makes an unsuccessful suicide attempt, after which he's sent to the DR and falls in love with the girl next door, who happens to be a prostitute. She seems to return his affections, but she's already in a relationship, and thus is created a situation doomed to an unhappy ending.

First things first: Junot Diaz is a fantastic writer. The narrative voice he creates for Yunior is like nothing I've ever read before. Diaz's prose is so lively it practically bursts off the page, and is filled with joy and sadness and anger and humor. It's also full of footnotes, Spanish, and pop culture references, and though I dutifully tracked down translations and explainers I honestly think you'd be okay if you just used context clues to figure it out, because otherwise you stop reading and being able to give your full attention to the narrative is the better option. Diaz's storytelling skills, the way he balances all of the elements of the book so it never drags or stumbles and sweeps you along, are a rare thing.

The elephant in the room: Junot Diaz is definitely not a feminist. He's been accused of sexual harassment and the writing in the book would tend to confirm that he has misogynistic tendencies. Yunior is presented as sympathetic although he continually cheats on his partners (including Lola). Oscar's quest for a girlfriend treats the women he desires as objects to be wooed and possessed. A portion of the book focuses on Hypatia's backstory, but presents first and foremost sex and violence. I'm sure it's easier for Diaz to have told the story the way he told it, but with his talent I would have hoped for better. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic book, which I very much enjoyed reading and want to read again someday. Be prepared for some issues with the presentation of women, but otherwise, I would recommend reading this book. 

One year ago, I was reading: Mindhunter

Two years ago, I was reading: Without A Prayer

Three years ago, I was reading: The Prince of Tides

Four years ago, I was reading: The Power

Five years ago, I was reading: Moonlight Palace

Six years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 315: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Book 282: The Goldfinch

 

"The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I'd been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any movement blow me apart."

Dates read: December 7-17, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize

When I was little, my mom took me (and later, my sister) often to the Detroit Institute of Arts. When I was really young, we lived in the city, so it wasn't a long drive. But even when we moved out to the suburbs, we went fairly frequently. It's an amazing museum, commensurate with the sophistication of Detroit at the time it was established, and I've been lucky enough to see some truly wonderful art there, but the first painting I remember loving isn't one of the big name pieces (though it is one of the most popular). It's called "The Nut Gatherers", by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and shows two little girls in a forest clearing. It's hard to put my finger on what I've always found so compelling about it, but it's my first memory of art that made me feel something.

While not every artwork is for everyone, great art can have a powerful effect on the viewer. The title work of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is a small painting by Carel Fabritius, showing the namesake bird perched on a feeder to which it is chained. Theo Decker first sees it on what is the worst day of his life. In trouble for getting into some adolescent mischief, he and his mother have been summoned to the principal's office. With time to kill before their meeting, they stop at the MoMA to see an exhibition that includes the title artwork. Theo likes the paintings, but is mostly busy paying attention to a lovely red-haired girl about his age, accompanied by a much older man. He's just spotted her again by the gift shop when his mother goes back to take one last look at the art...and then the bomb goes off. When Theo comes to, the old man he'd seen with the pretty redhead directs him to take The Goldfinch off the wall and keep it, and then dies.

Theo returns home, and when he learns of his mother's death, he's taken in by the upper-crust family of a school friend. He also forges a connection with Hobie, the business partner of the old man, who turns out to have been the great-uncle of Pippa, the red-headed girl he finally actually meets. Of course once Theo is finding some stability and solace, his father (who'd left the family and New York quite a while before) suddenly reappears, taking Theo back with him to his new home in Las Vegas. While there, the traumatized Theo meets fellow damaged teen Boris, who introduces him to drugs and alcohol. After another tragedy strikes, Theo takes back off to New York, going to Hobie for support, and eventually growing up to become his new partner in the antique shop he runs. But when a mysterious customer hints that he knows what happened to the long-missing painting, Theo finds himself drawn into a criminal underworld to try to extricate himself from his problem.

Tartt's The Secret History is an all-time favorite of mine. She's an assured and extremely talented writer, which is a good thing because this is a wildly ambitious novel. And she mostly pulls it off! There's a LOT going on here, but Tartt keeps her plot moving while she develops Theo, Boris, and Hobie into rich, deep characters. The references to classic literature, Great Expectations and Crime & Punishment particularly, are heady comparisons to invite but they feel earned, Tartt's writing quality really holds up to the canon. I was engrossed in the story she was telling me pretty much the whole time. And it's not a big thing, but as a transplant to Nevada myself (albeit the northern end), I thought she captured the feeling of the desert outskirts of Las Vegas beautifully, especially the ridiculous space of it when compared to a city as tightly compacted as New York. And I loved the way she wrote about Popper!

As good as it is, there are definitely things that don't quite work here. I thought the main female characters (Pippa and Kitsey) were mostly underwritten and sometimes felt contrived. Despite the occasional references to cell phones/modern technology, the book felt old-fashioned in a way that made those references feel shoehorned and anachronistic. It felt like the two "halves" of the book (Theo's childhood and then adulthood) were unbalanced...I thought some of the former could probably have been edited down to let the latter breathe a little more. And while Theo's issues with drugs were written in a way that made them very understandable, I've never found reading about people taking substances all that interesting and the book's continued engagement with it sometimes lost my attention. But all in all, these are fairly minor quibbles. The book is a very very good one, and I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind a bit of a doorstoper!

One year ago, I was reading: Foundation

Two years ago, I was reading: Jackaby

Three years ago, I was reading: The Book of Unknown Americans

Four years ago, I was reading: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Five years ago, I was reading: The President's Club

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Book 282: The Goldfinch

Book 281: Interpreter of Maladies

"She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the pleasing features unfirm, as if they still had to settle into some sort of permanent expression."

Dates read: December 4-7, 20187

Rating: 7/10

Lists/Awards: Pulitzer Prize

When you actually think about it, the United States is an enormous country. If you travel the distance equivalent of a few states in Europe, you're in an entirely different nation, with its own language and culture and customs. So it's no surprise that moving to a new region can feel, in a small way, like immigrating. When I moved from the Midwest to the Deep South for law school, I felt different from many of my classmates. We all spoke the same language and ostensibly had the same national norms, but life there was not like the life I'd known (and before you assume, I am not saying that to denigrate the South...people there were mostly lovely and there are few things that bother me more than people making cheap jokes at the expense of Southerners). And then moving again from the Midwest to the Mountain West, it was the same thing. I've been a Nevadan for nearly a decade now, but there are still little things that happen every so often that remind me that I'm not really from here.

Themes of immigration, of the struggle to understand a new culture, permeate Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. It's not necessarily the central point of every story, though...while all of them do feature Indian people, there are two that are set in India among Indians, and a few of them have white people as main characters. The stories cover a variety of situations, from a young couple struggling to reconnect after a tragedy to second-generation Indians traveling to the country of their parents' birth. Loneliness and disconnection are everywhere, and while many of the stories are more-or-less sad, there are also moments of levity and humor and on the whole this is surprisingly not a bummer collection to read.

I struggle so hard with conveying my thoughts on short stories, y'all, unless they're of the "interlinked" variety. For my money, this is a strong but (as almost always) uneven collection of work. My favorite stories were the opener ("A Temporary Matter") and the closer ("The Third and Final Continent"). That first one, about a couple reconnecting during a utility blackout, was a total incredible gut-punch and had me psyched for more of the same. And while there are high moments (like "This Blessed House", about a couple who keep finding tacky Christian decor in their new home and the tension between the husband and wife about what to do with it, which I found incredibly funny, and the not-at-all-funny-but-heartwrenching "Mrs. Sen's", about a preteen being babysat by a desperately lonely young Indian housewife), nothing comes close again to the impact of the first story until the last one, which relates the tale of a young Indian man who has just moved to the US and his very elderly white landlady.

All of the stories are very technically accomplished...they're well written, the characters are vivid, the prose is insightful. As someone with no gift at all for creative writing, I admire short stories almost more than I do novels. To tell a whole story that emotionally resonates in a limited page count is something fiendishly difficult, and Lahiri does it beautifully. While some of the stories are more closely related than others (there's no crossover in any of them), they all feel like they belong, nothing feels shoehorned in. Even some of the weaker stories, like "Sexy", have moments that I find indelible and remain with me even after reading several more books since I finished this one. If you like short stories, I'd highly recommend this. If you like Lahiri's work generally, I'd also recommend it. There's a reason this one won the Pulitzer, y'all: it's very good.

One year ago, I was reading: Foundation

Two years ago, I was reading: The Lowland

Three years ago, I was reading: The Kingmaker's Daughter

Four years ago, I was reading: The Leavers

Five years ago, I was reading: Dune

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Book 281: Interpreter of Maladies

Book 253: Less

 

 "He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again."

Dates read: August 6-9, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize

Can we ever really run away from our problems? The conventional wisdom is no, and for the most part I agree with that. Many of our issues are rooted in our own patterns of behavior and a change of scenery does nothing to fix that. But there sometimes is utility in getting out of a toxic environment. Being outside of our ruts in our personal roads can help us see them more clearly. New experiences can refocus our attention on what we really value. And besides, sometimes even just a break from what ails us can give us the strength to push through.

In Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning Less, the titular Arthur Less, a writer, decides to take a trip around the world in the face of two upsetting events: his fiftieth birthday, and the marriage of his sort-of-boyfriend of nearly a decade, Freddy Pelu, to another man. Nothing seems to be going quite right for him: after an auspicious debut, his subsequent novels have declined in both sales and critical acclaim, and he worries that the closest he will come to genius were his years dating Robert Brownburn, an acclaimed poet, and being in Robert's circle of writer and artist friends. When an invite to Freddy's wedding arrives, Less can't bring himself to either accept and be the subject of pitying looks or decline and know he'll set the gossip wheels turning with speculation that he's bitter. So he decides to be absent, creating a trip around the world for himself by accepting invitations for various and sundry events that he'd shoved in a drawer and never intended to actually respond to.

Less begins by leaving San Francisco for New York, where his new novel is gently declined by his publisher. And then it's off to Mexico, then France, then Italy for a prize ceremony for a translation of his book, then Germany to teach a summer course, then a trip to Morocco with friends, then a retreat in India to work on his book, then Japan to write an article about food for a travel magazine, and finally back, having neatly avoided both his birthday and the wedding. Along the way he runs into an ex he doesn't recognize, has a fling with academic, gets a custom-made suit, steps on a needle, and has to destroy his way out of a room. We get perspective on the life he's led through both his own reminisces and the voice of a narrator, whose identity is finally revealed to us as Arthur Less gets home.

I'll admit I was a little skeptical when this was chosen as a selection for my book club. "Funny" books can land wildly differently depending on the reader, and "prize-winning funny" does not tend to be a type of humor I find especially enjoyable. But what a delight this book was! I've talked before about how much my experience of a book can be impacted by what else I've read in the same time frame, and after the self-serious, sometimes ponderous Shantaram, the breezy lightness of Less just hit the spot. But it's not just a fluffy book at all. It's filled with sharp observations and resonant character notes, and the propulsive forward motion of the journey keeps the plot moving at a nice clip. It never gets bogged down anywhere. And while managing all that, it also excels at blending the moments of humor with sweetly poignant emotional work.

Writing a funny-yet-grounded book is hard, y'all. So many things to be balanced, and the Pulitzer has to be at least in part a recognition of how very well Greer crafted his work. Why, after all this gushing, is this not an even-more-highly-rated book for me? Two things: it didn't linger in my mind (books that I rate 9 or 10 stars stick with me long after reading), and the narrator reveal. While I thought it was an emotionally satisfying way to end the book, it didn't make logical sense, which spoiled it ever so slightly. That being said, it's a wonderful book that I heartily enjoyed, with meditations on aging, love, dignity, and identity that run beneath the parts that make you laugh to make you think. I'd recommend it to everyone!

One year ago, I was reading: The Age of Miracles

Two years ago, I was reading: Flip

Three years ago, I was reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Four years ago, I was reading: Sophie's Choice

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Book 253: Less

Book 249: Olive Kitteridge

"As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can't occasionally take a little of this, a little of that—just to keep the self-doubt alive. Give herself a little burst. Because Christopher doesn't need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything. Nobody knows everything—they shouldn't think they do." 

Dates read: July 17-20, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize

It's easy to think that we really know the people in our social circle. We see them being regularly rude and snappy, we write them off as jerks. They're always kind and thoughtful when we see them, we assume that they're a good person. But it's hard, if not impossible, to actually completely know anyone else. The lovely human we know in the work place might go home and be cruel to their family. The person we see being prickly could spend hours volunteering in their community. Unless we've seen someone in every possible context, there's always an aspect of them that could be missing from who we think we know.

The thirteen short stories that make up Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge all feature the main character at least once. Sometimes she's the center of it. Sometimes she's a passing reference between two other people who live in her small Maine town. It moves roughly chronologically, beginning when Olive and her husband Henry are already older and headed toward retirement (though the first story, about Henry, is mostly a flashback), and their son Christopher is an adult. Olive negotiates her relationships with her family and her community at large as they all change, slowly but inexorably...or, often just as aggravatingly for her, don't change much at all.

Though many of the lives we encounter look at least moderately happy on the surface, there's often profound sadness lurking underneath. This is not new territory, suburban dysfunction and familial drama, and while there's nothing special plot-wise it's Strout's skill as a writer that makes this book shine. Each story is a whole unto itself but subtly builds to create a full picture of Olive, her strengths and her flaws. She can be infuriating, as when she deals with the fear from finding herself the victim of a crime by berating her husband, and she can be deeply relatable and sympathetic, like when she overhears her new daughter-in-law mocking the dress she made herself for their wedding. She is stubborn and proud and controlling and rendered with profound emotional truth. Strout never has to explicitly ascribe these qualities to Olive, because she understands the power of showing rather than telling, which she does in spare-yet-lovely prose.

As in any short story collection, some entries are stronger than others. I loved the first one, "Pharmacy" about Olive's husband's long-ago infatuation with a shy technician at his pharmacy, and two where Olive is only a background mention, "Winter Concert" and "Ship in a Bottle". Some others, like "Tulips" and "The Piano Player", failed to move me. But one of the upsides to reading short stories is that even if you don't care for a particular story, it'll be over soon! I'll be honest, I was not looking forward to reading this book, because it felt like I was in a rut of books that were interconnected vignettes without strong central plots and I wanted to read something with more structure. Happily, though, it's good enough that I found myself very much enjoying it and I'd highly recommend it even if you're skeptical of short stories!

One year ago, I was reading: Tower

Two years ago, I was reading: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Three years ago, I was reading: Boys and Girls Together

Four years ago, I was reading: Life Itself

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Book 249: Olive Kitteridge

Book 247: The Looming Tower

"On the existential plane, Bin Laden was marginalized, out of play, but inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims. His life and the symbols in which he cloaked himself powerfully embodied the pervasive sense of dispossession that characterized the modern Muslim world. In his own miserable exile, he absorbed the misery of his fellow believers; his loss entitled him to speak for theirs; his vengeance would sanctify their suffering. The remedy he proposed was to declare war on the United States."

Dates read: July 5-11, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize, The New York Times bestseller

I'm naturally a high-strung person. Always have been. I'm the type who gets up out of bed to double check if I can't remember locking the door. Every once in a while, I have to remind myself with statistics that what's most likely to harm me are things I do constantly: get in the car and drive, cross the street on my way in to work, exist in a world filled with carcinogens. I'm not the only one, either. I think a lot of us are more frightened by the kinds of things that make newspaper headlines than the ones that are much more likely to be lethal. It's unlikely we'll get caught in a deadly tornado or raging wildfire. It's also vanishingly unlikely we'd ever find ourselves the victim of a terror attack.

And yet, ever since September 11th, that fear has loomed large in the American cultural imagination. It happened once, and it could happen again. But how exactly did it come to happen? That is the question Lawrence Wright seeks to answer in The Looming Tower, in which he traces the development of radical Islam and the life of Osama bin Laden, through the rise of al-Queda and the intelligence community turf wars that handicapped the country's ability to understand and prepare for the threat. It's a story that begins with seeds planted by a few in Egypt that grows to expand to Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the United States. It's a story about people, about men whose understandings of the world are on a collision course. It's a story about near-misses and mistakes that ends in tragedy.

I was a little hesitant when I picked this up...I'd read Ghost Wars about six months before and was worried that this would largely be a rehash of things I'd recently read. But that concern turned out to be unfounded. While there's certainly overlap, that book was focused heavily on Afghanistan, and the CIA's involvement in that country's recent history. This book is really about al-Queda and how it's leaders, Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, came to join together and carry out attacks against the West from their position in Afghanistan. If you're interested in this general subject area and think you might want to read one of these two books, I'd suggest The Looming Tower (or at least reading it first). 

While there is no denying the incredible research and level of detail in Ghost Wars, the end result is a book that tends toward the dense. Having read it once, I'm sure it would take me at least another few passes through it to really feel like everything was sinking it. The Looming Tower doesn't bring that level of specificity, but it's not really trying to either. That's not to insinuate that it's not deeply rooted in fact and without a breadth of source material. The references section is extensive. But what The Looming Tower does well is actually stringing that all together into a cohesive narrative. Depending on the author's skill level (and, to be honest, intended audience), non-fiction can struggle with storytelling and a tendency toward dryness. But this is where Wright shines. Despite working with names, places, and concepts that are largely only vaguely familiar to a Western readership, he never lets the pace get bogged down in information dumps. Like the events it recounts, it keeps on moving forward to what we know is coming.

That's not to say it's perfect. There's an emphasis on counter-terrorism expert John O'Neill (who died helping evacuate others on 9/11), especially his personal life, that doesn't quite fit in with the overall flow of the book that I think should have gotten trimmed. And, having read Ghost Wars, I thought the situation in Afghanistan and the relationship of al-Queda and the Taliban was simplified too far. I think the book could have added about 50 pages and given everything a bit more depth and shading and been stronger for it. But for a primer on the situation in the Middle East and inside the federal bureaucracy that culminated in September 11th, written for a wide audience, I think this a very good book indeed. I highly recommend it!

One year ago, I was reading: The Forgotten Sister

Two years ago, I was reading: Life After Life

Three years ago, I was reading: Stoner

Four years ago, I was reading: Lights Out In The Reptile House

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Book 247: The Looming Tower

Book 201: Ghost Wars

"The Taliban assembled their story so that Pashtuns could recognize it as a revival of old glory. The Taliban connected popular, rural Islamic values with a grassroots Durrani Pashtun tribal rising. They emerged at a moment when important wealthy Pashtun tribal leaders around Kandahar hungered for a unifying cause. The Taliban hinted that their militia would become a vehicle for the return to Afghanistan of King Zahir Shah from his exile in Rome. They preached for a reborn alliance of Islamic piety and Pashtun might."

Dates read: January 6-17, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize, The New York Times best-seller

There's no denying that we live in a golden age for information. Thanks to the internet, access to pretty much anything we might want to know is literally at our fingertips! There is virtually no subject too obscure for Wikipedia, and anyone who wants to tell us what they know can start up a blog and start writing. While this phenomenon is pretty much always useful, it's also kind of exhausting. Given access to learn about pretty much anything you might want, it's a lot easier to retreat into the familiar.

Until September 11th, Afghanistan would have been a pretty obscure area in which to be a subject matter expert. Afterwards, of course, we all found out a lot about the Taliban and the Northern Alliance and the Pashtun people, but honestly it was all so much so fast that I know I (and probably lots of other people) ended up more confused than anything else. Steve Coll's Ghost Wars tells the story of American involvement in Afghanistan, beginning around the Cold War and ending on September 10th of 2001, and it tied together a lot of the dangling strings that American involvement in Afghanistan after September 11th left me with. Deeply researched and very informative, this is a thorough portrait of how we got to where we are.

Geopolitics in Central and South Asia turns out to be really complicated! The CIA's involvement began as a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the desire to have a firewall against the spread of Communism. It continued even after their withdrawal to both prevent a re-invasion and because of the US's relationship with Pakistan, which saw Afghanistan as a firewall of its own against India. And then there's Saudi Arabia, which had its own complicated relationships with not only Afghanistan, where it exported its brand of intense Islam, but of course the United States, as well as Pakistan. It's very messy, and trying to learn about it feels like intensely watching a magician to try to discern the sleight-of-hand...you've got your eye on one part of the stage, but to really understand the whole picture, there's something going on somewhere else that's going to be important to the way it comes together. And then of course there's the relationship of the CIA to their own government and the American public, which had a very real impact on how much, and how effectively, the CIA was able to actually do.

It becomes patently obvious while reading this book that there was very likely no one single factor that would have prevented terror attacks from taking place on American soil. There were too many forces that were all coming into alignment for it to be avoided entirely. But it does raise (without proselytizing about) issues that might have kept the particular 9/11 attack from coming to fruition that are, of course, all too easy to see in hindsight: US funding for the Northern Alliance, more willingness to heed the increasingly frenzied warnings that al-Qiada was eager and capable of an attack, a more forceful relationship with Pakistan, etc after etc. Coll doesn't try to lay blame at anyone in particular's feet, but he's also not interested in massaging or obscuring information that would let anyone claim absolution, either. He's interested in presenting as full a picture as he reasonably can, and he accomplishes that.

Considering that it's nonfiction designed to reach a mass audience, it's about as comprehensive as anyone should want/expect. In fact, if I'm being honest, its biggest flaw is that there is so much information being presented that it's overly dense. It's hard, because it never came off like there were details being dumped extraneously so it's not that it just needed a more diligent editor, but the reality is that it's a fact-heavy story, with a lot of new people/situations needing to be introduced to the reader with sufficient context, so the result is a book that ends up feeling kind of like a slog even though it's interesting and relevant. And honestly, I prefer that kind of approach to one that cuts out important bits to dumb itself down for the reader. To sum up, I do recommend this book if you're interesting in learning about the history of the US in Afghanistan. It's well-written and a very good resource. But if fact-intensive non-fiction isn't your jam and this isn't a subject of particular interest to you, there's no need to torture yourself.

One year ago, I was reading: The Fly Trap

Two years ago, I was reading: The Royals

Three years ago, I was reading: Sophie's Choice

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Book 201: Ghost Wars

Book 188: The Underground Railroad

"She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them."

Dates read: November 6-11, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, The New York Times bestseller

Does anyone in popular American culture have a more valuable public endorsement than Oprah? She spent decades as the most trusted voice of American housewives through the power of The Oprah Winfrey Show, and when she's given a person or product her imprimatur, it's often a game changer. She's the reason Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz have the careers they do (whether or not that's a good thing, I'll leave up to you). When it turned out A Million Little Pieces was made up of a million little lies, half of the outrage felt like it was because someone had had the gall to lie to Oprah. And lately, I'm sure I can't even imagine how many more women joined Weight Watchers at her urging.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of her blessings have been the authors who wrote books which she included in her book club. Her power is such than in 2016, her selection of The Underground Railroad for that book club drove Colson Whitehead and his publisher to release it two months ahead of schedule. From there, it won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and ended up on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. Obviously that kind of attention had nothing to do with Our Lady Winfrey, but it probably helped the book become a #1 best-seller. Which means that a lot of people who might not have otherwise picked it up did, which is a good thing because this book bends time and history to lay out a damning case on the way America has done wrong by Black people.

Set in the antebellum South, The Underground Railroad focuses on the journey of one slave woman, Cora, towards freedom. The granddaughter of a woman who survived the Middle Passage and was enslaved in Georgia, and the daughter of a slave who ran away when she was just a child, Cora has spent much of her life as an outcast even among her own community. So she's surprised when another slave, Caesar, approaches her to run away with him to find the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead's alternative history, the railroad is literal...there are stations built into the earth that spirit slaves away to the north.

Run away they do, and Cora finds herself first in South Carolina, which in this world has outlawed slavery but holds ownership of Black people itself, and then distributes them as it sees fit in service work. But they're also secretly infecting men with syphilis to study it, and sterilizing women...and then Cora finds out she's being chased by a man called Ridgeway, a slave catcher. So the next stop is North Carolina, which has abolished slavery too...out of a fear that the Black majority population of the state will rebel against their masters. It's replaced their labor with white indentured servants, and escaped slaves are publicly executed. Cora hides there for a while, but before she can devise an escape, she's caught by Ridgeway. That doesn't mean she stops fighting for her freedom, but freedom isn't an easy thing for a slave to find.

I wanted to love this. I wanted to find it a revelation. And it's good, very good actually. Whitehead's prose is both lovely and powerful. And I understand why he can't "go easy" on Cora...it reads sometimes like she's a punching bag for the universe and she barely gets room to breathe before she's knocked down again, but that's probably what it feels like to be African-American, obviously back then and to a lesser but still very real degree even now. And the characters are interesting, with Whitehead even writing one-off chapters from perspectives other than Cora's, to give us context for the people who have an impact on Cora's life and where they're coming from when they interact with her.

But I just never connected with and got emotionally invested in the novel the way I do for the books that distinguish themselves for me as "great". I cared only in a kind of distant way about Cora, and for all that the side characters were developed they mostly just faded away...when Caesar and Cora are separated relatively early in the proceedings, for instance, I never found myself missing him on the page. And while I cared about Cora and what was going to become of her, it was never in the way where I wanted to skip ahead to see how she might make it around each obstacle thrown in her path. I'm not quite sure why that was, honestly...like I said, Whitehead's writing is incredible so it's not for any lack of ability to make her more compelling on his part. It just didn't quite get there for me. Nevertheless, it's a very good and powerful book, and one that I'd recommend to just about everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: Disgrace

Two years ago, I was reading: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

Three years ago, I was reading: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

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Book 188: The Underground Railroad

Book 159: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits could be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."

Dates read: July 6-14, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize, New York Times bestseller

I hate plenty of pieces of beloved literature. I had a whole post on it quite soon after I started my blog, but to save you the effort of going and finding it and myself the cringing I'd surely do if I went back and read it (I like to think that I'm getting better at writing this thing as I go along), I'll give you some of the highlights. I got nothing from Gone With The Wind. I LOATHED The Catcher In The Rye. I find Pride & Prejudice the least compelling of the Austen I've read so far. I did not at all care for The Great Gatsby when I first read it (thankfully, I re-read it after high school and now it's a favorite). Part of it is that everyone has different tastes, and part of it is the hype that comes from reading something that so many people have told you is amazing. It creates expectations that are really hard to live up to.

When you have a novel that tops many critical lists as one of the best of the 21st century, is considered a modern Great American Novel, and has won the Pulitzer, that's a lot of hype. So I have to admit I was a little nervous to start Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. What if all the hype was just, well, hype and I'd be slogging through like 600 pages of something I couldn't connect with? But starting on like page 50, I turned to my husband and announced "this is a really good book that I'm reading". I proceeded to announce this to just about everyone who might possibly care and probably several people who didn't. The hype is real, guys. This book is amazing.

It begins with the arrival of 19 year-old Josef Kavalier in Brooklyn, where his 17 year-old cousin Sammy Klayman is startled to find that he has a Czechoslovakian cousin, much less one with whom he's suddenly expected to share a room. Joe has just been smuggled out of Prague, where it's becoming more and more dangerous to be a Jewish person as Hitler's power begins to rise, and he's determined to make the most from the sacrifices his family undertook on his behalf and get them out, too. When he notices his cousin's talent for drawing, along with his own knack for a catchy story, Sammy has an idea: comic books. Superman has enraptured American youth, and soon the team that dubs itself Kavalier and Clay has a hero of their own: The Escapist, who cannot be contained by lock or key. The book then follows the players through time, as their comics become quite popular indeed: the bond that grows between them, Joe's struggle to get his family back, both men falling in love for the first time, and the fallout from major losses that rock them.

The quality of the writing is so, so good. I'd read Chabon's more recent Moonglow several months prior to this, so I was prepared for a well-told, wide-ranging tale, but this blows that one out of the water. I've added several other of his works to my TBR, but I'd be shocked if they could measure up to this one. Not that he's not extremely talented, but this has the feel of a masterpiece. It's detailed and rich and involving...I moved through it at a pace significantly slower than I usually read because there was so much there and I didn't want to miss a single turn of phrase. There are several situations in the book that are fantastical to the point of almost being preposterous, but Chabon lays so much groundwork and is so sensitive to the emotional truth of his deeply-realized characters that he's earned the trust of the readers to go there and they very much work. It's an incredible book and I would recommend it to any human that enjoys reading.

Tell me, blog friends, what super-hyped books let you down?

One year ago, I was reading: The Girl in the Tower

Two years ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Three years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 159: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Book 99: The Executioner's Song

"Once, she was running around the place and he called to her. Something in his voice made her tear all the way down, and she couldn't stop and banged into him, hitting her knee so hard it really hurt. Gary picked her up then. She had her legs wrapped around his waist, and her arms over his neck. With her eyes closed, she had the odd feeling of an evil presence near her that came from Gary. She found it kind of half agreeable. Said to herself, Well, if he is the devil, maybe I want to get closer."

Dates read: October 15-28, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize, New York Times Bestseller

The death penalty is one of those political issues that people seem to have a gut-level, strong response to. You're either horrified by the idea of the state taking the lives of its citizens, or you see it as a powerful, necessary statement of the state's ability to punish those that have violated its most fundamental laws in the most profound way possible. It's one of those issues it's pointless to argue about...the reaction to it is visceral rather than logical. As it stands now, the United States is on the verge of having to have a broad conversation about it again, as one of the drugs that make up the judicially-approved "cocktail" for lethal injection is effectively no longer available for executions. Will there be a replacement developed, will we go back to the gas chamber, nooses, and firing squads, or will it be abolished? Only time will tell.

The death penalty has, of course, been abolished once before. In Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, the Supreme Court in a very divided opinion struck down death penalty statutes all over the country, citing arbitrariness and racism in determining which defendants were subjected to it. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court reversed itself and allowed the death penalty to resume. The first person to be executed after Gregg was a man in Utah named Gary Gilmore. In The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer tells the story of how that came to be.

It's not actually all that complicated. Although he was quite bright, Gary had an unstable childhood and started getting into trouble young, stealing cars and getting sent first to juvie and then real jail. At 22, he was imprisoned for armed robbery and after spending 14 years on the inside, he was eventually paroled and went to Utah to live with a cousin. Although his family and new community genuinely tried to help him, Gary had a hard time adjusting to life in the real world...until he met Nicole Baker. Nicole had a troubled history of her own, including commitment to a mental health facility and two divorces (along with two children) at the age of 19. Their relationship was intense but turbulent, and their breakup left Gary spiraling out of control. He shot and killed both a gas station attendant and a hotel clerk, and was caught, tried, and sentenced to death in relatively short order. When the sentence was pronounced, Gary decided not to fight it...he went through lawyers until he found one that would honor his decision to not appeal and let the penalty be carried out. Although a few appeals were undertaken on his behalf, much to his fury, he was ultimately executed by firing squad on January 17, 1977.

Out of this, Mailer spins a 1000+ page epic. And there's probably an incredible 500-600 page book inside of it somewhere, but boy howdy was this in screaming need of a firm editor. The book is divided into two roughly equal sections...the first ends with Gary's sentence, and the second not too long after his execution. Both portions drag for extended periods. Although Mailer's prose style is interesting and engaging, his determination to include everything he uncovered in his clearly very extensive research weighs down the narrative. The book takes a couple hundred pages to get to the point where the murders happen...which are then over, along with the trial, in about fifty. The back half of the book is dedicated as much to the wheelings and dealings of Hollywood players trying to get the rights to Gary's story as it is to Gary's actual story, and though there's a statement in there about how Gary pretty much stopped being a person and started being a commodity from that point forward, it's honestly just not that compelling. I never had any emotional investment in the relationship between Lawrence Schilling and his girlfriend, although from the attention Mailer paid to it you would think it's an important component of the proceedings. The book finishes strong by recounting Gary's last hours, death, and the immediate fallout on his loved ones, but there had been so many bumps in the road along the way that I was mostly just glad it was over. You have to admire its ambition and scope, but the actual product is very uneven. It's worth reading, if you're interested in this kind of thing, but not a must-read by any stretch.

Tell me, blog friends...do you get into political arguments?

One year ago, I was reading: this book!

Two years ago, I was reading: Gilded

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Book 99: The Executioner's Song

Book 86: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

"Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a single feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God."

Dates read: September 4-6, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: Pulitzer Prize, Time All-Time 100 Novels

Life isn't fair. It's a lesson our parents start trying to teach us young, usually, but it takes a long time to really stick. Sometimes good things happen to bad people for no reason, and the reverse is even more infuriatingly true. Someone who could have helped cure cancer was probably shot somewhere today and there's nothing we can do about it. Why? Just because. Same reason these kind of things happen all the time.

It might sound bleak, but this kind of thinking actually makes me feel better when bad things happen. It's nothing personal, it's just the way things are. But to Brother Juniper in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, that explanation isn't good enough. Brother Juniper is a monk, and in his eyes, people die for a reason. So when five people fall to their deaths when a Peruvian bridge collapses, he gathers their stories to try to puzzle out why.

The five are are an older woman estranged from her beloved daughter, that woman's young helpmeet, a young man mourning the loss of his identical twin brother, a stage manager who made an actress famous, and the actress' son. It's a brief little novella, but it's actually more a series of interconnected short stories than anything else. There are four stories going on: the story of the fall of the bridge and its effect on the local populace, the story of the woman and her companion, the story of the twin, and the story of the manager and the actress' son. The people on the bridge, far from being sinners cast down by a vengeful deity, were for the most part flawed but fundamentally good people who had experienced sorrow but were about to make a turn into happiness. What divine justice is there in that?

Even Brother Juniper can't see any. But while the mysteries of life and death may not be revealed by the story of those who perished with the bridge, what really comes through in these stories is love. The love of a parent for her child, the affection between companions, the love of siblings, romantic love, unrequited love...it actually reminds me of Love, Actually (which I know some people wish would vanish entirely from the earth, and definitely has issues, but I attach a lot of sentimental value to) in the way that it highlights the bonds between people. At the end, it's love that moves us, no matter what form that love takes.

This is a small book with a big reputation, and I...didn't really get the hype? Yes, it was good and surprisingly thought-provoking considering its length, but I wouldn't have identified it as a literary classic if I didn't already know it was exactly that going in, if you know what I mean. It was definitely a quality piece of writing, but it wasn't...special. I would be willing to bet that within a year I will have forgotten that I ever read it but for the recordation of it on this here blog. But it is a classic, so it's apparently been very meaningful to some people and it's definitely an enjoyable, quick read.

Tell me, blog friends...to look at the other side of the coin here, is there a novel that you think should be a classic that you can't understand why it's not?

One year ago, I was reading: The White Queen

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Book 86: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Book 69: The Shipping News

 "Quoyle was not going back to New York, either. If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it. Thought of his stupid self in Mockingburg, taking whatever came at him. No wonder love had shot him through the heart and lungs, caused internal bleeding."

Dates read: July 12-17, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize

I am a habit-bound person. All I need to do to get myself into any sort of routine is make myself do something for a few weeks, and I'll just keep on doing it once I get set into it. This comes in handy with exercise (once I can make myself get out there and actually do it, of course) and lunch (I eat literally the same exact thing every day and have for years), less so when I get so stuck in my patterns that I don't get outside the box every once in a while. There's a happy medium between slavish devotion to a habit and complete chaos, and working on finding that medium is something that's challenged me for years now.

But the rewards of actually scooching outside of your established patterns can be high indeed. And finding the kind of ordinary bravery that it takes to make a change in your circumstances and how powerfully doing so can change you for the better, is what for me was at the heart of Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. Our protagonist, Quoyle (his last name, he's never given a first name), grew up the less-loved son of a cruel father. He's a big man, not particularly attractive nor particularly mentally gifted, and with the kind of aura of pathetic sadness that people seem to avoid almost in fear that it'll be catching.

He ends up working at a newspaper, and then meets and somehow marries Petal, who is lovely but unhinged, and manages to have two daughters with her. She quickly comes to loathe Quoyle, and is constantly and obviously unfaithful. She finally leaves him, but karma comes around fast and she's killed in a car accident almost immediately afterwards, leaving him a despondent widower and single father. Luckily, this is when his father's sister turns up and invites him to join her in returning to the small coastal town she and Quoyle's father grew up in: a place called Killick-Claw in Newfoundland.

Not having any other real options, Quoyle accepts and gets a job covering car crashes and shipping news for the local paper, The Gammy Bird. Over time, he develops real and deep friendships with the other townspeople, and grows closer to a young widow raising a child of her own. These slow developments in Killick-Claw make up both the bulk of the book (the plot is pretty front-loaded) and the meat of the book: Quoyle coming into his own is what it's actually about more than anything else.
This book seems like it should be tailor-made for me: small-town life, lovely prose, character study. But it just never quite clicked, much to my regret. Proulx's writing is fantastic, lovely and evocative without going into purple territory. She builds Quoyle bit by bit, showing you who he is without telling you...Quoyle's constant demonstrations of affection and concern to his daughters makes it clear how deeply important they are to him without Proulx having to spell it out. But I think it was my issues with Petal that torpedoed it for me. Besides her preposterous name (Petal Bear? really?), she couldn't have been more of a two-dimensional character: she is hateful and cruel and it's not enough to have her cheat on him, she has to bring men to their house to do it. It's not enough for her to eventually leave with the girls, she has to sell them to a pornographer (obviously they are recovered). I could believe that the kicked-dog of a man he is in the beginning would continue to love her despite the cheating, but after she tries to sell their kids like that, I can't believe that anyone would so easily forgive and hold on to that relationship as their great love affair. And since his slow process of recovery in a new place constantly references her and their tragic "love", I never could quite buy into it. Just never came together for me the way I wanted it to.

Tell me, blog friends...what do you think you couldn't forgive?

One year ago, I was reading: On The Edge of Gone

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Book 69: The Shipping News

Book 27: The Good Earth

"Moving together in a perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her which took the pain from his labor. He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect symmetry of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their homes and fed their bodies and made their gods."

Dates read: March 3-6, 2016

Rating: 4/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize

Once upon a time, many if not most people lived a predominantly agrarian lifestyle. You were born on a farm, you lived on a farm, you died on a farm, and while you were alive you ate the food you grew. Money for things you couldn't grow came from selling the things that did. And then the Industrial Revolution happened, and cities boomed, and no matter how much presidential candidates like to say the opposite when they're spending time in Iowa at the beginning of the campaign cycle, the era of the small family farm is effectively over and it's never coming back. That's not to say that no one in America lives on a family farm anymore, obviously, but the numbers are small and declining every year.

Besides Iowa, why is it that we romanticize those days so much? For my money, there's a very profound appeal of a time when it seemed like life was so much simpler, when you worked with your hands to get what you needed. Especially in this day and age, where I'm sitting at a desk typing this into a computer, but the sentimental attachment to that time seems to have been around for quite a while, because when Pearl Buck won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, the Dust Bowl hadn't even happened yet.

The Good Earth takes place in China in the early 1900s, and tells the story of the rise and subsequent decline of Wang Lung. A peasant farmer, the book opens with his marriage to O-Lan, a former slave for the Hwang family (the wealthiest landowners in the town close to where Wang Lung lives). O-Lan is not beautiful or clever, but she's just as hard of a worker as Wang Lung himself, and together the two of them manage to run his farm well enough that they are able to buy some of the Hwang's lands. They have two sons, but just after their first daughter is born, a terrible famine strikes. When there is no longer anything to eat and the countryside is turning to cannibalism to survive, the family sells most of their possessions (but Wang Lung refuses to sell their land) and moves south to survive through cheap labor and begging in the city. When a peasant uprising happens, Wang Lung and O-Lan grab money and jewels and return north. Having learned a powerful lesson about having reserves, the family buys the rest of the Hwang land and farms diligently, to the point where Wang Lung is wealthy and can send his children to school instead of keeping them in the fields. Indeed, soon Wang Lung himself doesn't need to be in the fields, and that's when the problems start.

The book is not subtle about its equation of land and manual labor with virtue...the farther removed Wang Lung and his family get from the labor of their own hands on the earth they own, the farther they morally decline. Wang Lung becomes infatuated with a spoiled young prostitute and buys her for a concubine, putting aside his faithful wife. His school-educated sons marry petty women and have no interest in farming or running their father's holdings...like the once-wealthy and powerful Hwangs in the beginning, they just want to get rid of the land and seeking their fortunes elsewhere. It's actually pretty socialist in its depiction of money as evil and corrupting and the glorification of the proletariat lifestyle.

At the end of the day, I just didn't like it very much. The characters aren't people, they're symbols who are used to illustrate Buck's parable. And they're not even particularly compelling symbols: Wang Lung is never all that sympathetic, O-Lan is a doormat, the sketchy uncle and his wife are terrible and gross right from the start. If reading all that Joseph Campbell recently taught me anything, it's that symbols done right can be incredibly powerful (for instance, Francis Ford Coppolla's The Godfather, and I'm specifically referring here to the great film rather than the mediocre book, tells a similar story about a man who becomes what he once despised in a much more interesting and emotionally resonant way). Not so here for me. The writing is solid, but not anything special enough to drive interest in the lack of a good story and characters. This particular piece of classic literature (which is a genre I've been exploring over the past few years) doesn't do it for me.

Tell me, blog friends...do you have any classic lit that you've been disappointed by?

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 27: The Good Earth

Book 10: All The King's Men

"But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.” 

Dates read: November 27- December 6, 2015

Rating: 10/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Time's All-Time 100 Novels, Newsweek's Top 100 Books, The Observer's 100 Best Novels

Like I mentioned a little while back, apart from my bookworm tendencies, I'm also a big fan of movies. I remember watching the Sean Penn movie version of this novel and (like many critics for what was supposed to be an awards-bait picture) walking away deeply unimpressed. I didn't even really remember the plot of the story, except that the main character was supposedly based on former Governor of Louisiana Huey Long and that it was "about" political corruption.

As it turns out, the actual novel is only partially about political corruption. Politics is mostly a framing device for the real story. The meat of the book is about how actions have consequences, and that there's no getting around that. Reporter-turned-political-staffer-type Jack Burden (it's hard to describe what it actually is he does for Willie Stark, the Huey Long analogue referenced above, and don't think for a second that surname isn't symbolic) burned out of his Ph.D. program when he uncovered a story that made the consequences of heedless actions too real, and tries to hide behind inaction to save him from having to deal with that kind of responsibility. His work for Stark means that he mostly doesn't have to make decisions, until it intersects with his personal life in a way that starts forcing him to do just that and refusing to let him slip quietly away from the results.

That central conceit, though, isn't really clear until you get about halfway through with the story. The first part of the story feels very much like a standard issue dramatic story about yes, politics and corruption. We learn the story of Willie Stark, how he made it from a bumpkin, to a young political appointee fighting a shady, kickback-laden county contract, to a stooge goaded into running for Governor by people using him for their own purposes, to a morally questionable Governor himself. That part of the novel is interesting and easily digestible enough, but the real power of it comes from the later, more philosophical part that shifts Stark's story into the background and brings Jack's story up front.

The storyline wrangling and plot development is masterful, but where the real beauty of this book is are the words. Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, but he also won one for poetry, and you can tell. Picking out a highlight quote was torture...I read this on the Kindle and digitally underlined about half the book because I was so in love with the language. It's a page turner, but not in a suspenseful kind of way. You just want to keep reading it to keep basking in the glory of the writing. I was sad to put it down when it was over.

Tell me, blog friends: what politically-themed books or movies float your boat?

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Book 10: All The King's Men

Book 1: Beloved

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

Dates read: October 6-October 11, 2015

Rating: 10/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, American Book Award, Time's All-Time 100 Novels, NY Times Best Books of the Year, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Newsweek's Top 100 Books, 501 Must Read Books

I grew up in a small town in southeast Michigan full of white people. In my graduating class of over 300, I can think of four people of color. Slavery and Jim Crow were things we learned about in sterile classrooms, that happened a long time ago and far away.

I went to school at the University of Michigan, where I experienced cultural diversity that I'd never known before. My friends were Indian, Jewish, Persian, Chinese...but it wasn't until I went to law school at the University of Alabama that I started to have friends that were black. And race relations in the South were an eye opener for someone that had lived in what's now pretty obviously some odd little bubbles: first of homogeneity, and then a bastion of progressive politics.

I've read African-American lit before, obviously...Native Son, The Color Purple, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Bluest Eye, 12 Years A Slave. But with the possible exception of the last one on that list, none really drove home the harrowing legacy of slavery quite as viscerally as this one.

Beloved tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who lives in Ohio with her teenage daughter, Denver, in isolation in a house haunted by a baby ghost. When Paul D, a former slave who was on the same plantation as Sethe, arrives on her doorstep, everything begins to change. Paul D banishes the baby ghost, but just as things start to settle into something resembling peaceful, a strange young woman named Beloved appears outside Sethe's house and insinuates herself into the family to disastrous effect.

The story switches back and forth in time, from Sethe's young womanhood on the plantation to where the story began, even as the present storyline progresses. Horrors only lightly hinted at in the beginning develop fully as Beloved begins to assert her control, showing how Sethe and Denver ended up alone together in that haunted house to begin with. Beloved herself becomes more than just a mysteriously powerful young woman, breaking the people around her down from the inside, she becomes symbolic of the monstrous nature of slavery itself. Sethe, Paul D, and Denver might be "free", but the pernicious legacy of slavery is inescapable.

I found myself wondering as I was reading the book if Toni Morrison had read any Eastern European Jewish folklore, for Beloved reminded me of nothing so much as a dybbuk. True to a kind of folklore style, the novel relies heavily on magical realism, which isn't usually my favorite style of writing (I love fantasy novels, but I like them separately from my regular fiction), but works very effectively here. It allows Beloved to have many psychological lenses through which she can be interpreted without letting the story be set comfortably away from actual experience. Beloved, and Beloved, demands that we confront the real, continuing injustice of slavery. It doesn't let us hide behind long ago and far away.

Tell me, blog friends...what books especially moved you to think about a social justice issue you'd never really thought of before? Do you have any favorite books by black female authors that you'd like to recommend?

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Book 1: Beloved