Tag: fiction

THE DRY by Jane Harper

I found this in the NY Times list of the best thrillers of the last century. I was in a bit of a reading drought, so I thought I’d give it a go. I don’t usually read thrillers but I clearly needed a page turner. And it was pretty good. The pages turned as we investigated a murder-suicide that turned out to be a murder-murder.

I am still not so into thrillers. I did enjoy the setting, being a small Australian town during a drought. This being the warmest summer in the UK since 1976, it felt appropriate.

SUNSET SONG by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

This is often called Scotland’s favourite book, and I get it. Published in 1932, it is fiction, but based so heavily on the author’s childhood in rural Scotland that his neighbours complained about it on publication. Like most books about childhood, and particularly rural childhoods, it is very much an elegy. It absolutely aches with a love of the Scottish countryside. It’s also very funny, capturing a wide range of local characters, often not in the most flattering way (thus the complaints)

It mostly tells the story of the coming to adulthood of a young woman called Chris Guthrie. One plot line that really surprised me, given the period, was her mother’s death. They had already four kids when she got pregnant with twins, and after they were born she told her husband she didn’t want any more children. He told her she would be thanking god for whatever ‘she was given.’ She later killed herself and the toddler twins, apparently because she found out she was pregnant again. Poor lady, she just couldn’t face it. And all this just because this guy didn’t want to pull out. Apparently the entire neighbourhood did go ahead and blame the husband, for ‘breeding his lie like a sow.’ This all seems very modern to me now, and apparently it did to people then too, as it caused quite a scandal. I can only say, thank god for birth control and divorce.

One point of interest is that the book is fairly difficult to read, because the author was trying to capture the ‘Scotch language’ in English form (so a ‘braw’ hat becomes a ‘brave’ hat). The glossary is forbidding. But I enjoyed it all the same.

IMAGINE ME GONE by Adam Haslett

Honestly readers are just so difficult. Here is a work of great artistry that I whipped through. It’s a sad story about the long shadow of a father’s suicide. And yet I hardly remember it. I mean honestly I feel the author: what is it readers want!! I did like this part, where a thirty something is reflecting on the Ansel Adams in his New York apartment:

“I was reminded how little I done to make (the apartment) my own . . One of thousands of adult dorm rooms in Manhattan, where credentialed children performed their idea of adult lives.”

EXIT LANE by Erika Veurink

I seem to be reading more genre fiction these days. Does this mean brainrot? I fear so.

In any case, this one’s a romcom. Interestingly, it’s from a startup with >$4m in investment, that’s basically a publishing imprint with associated income streams (e.g., buy the wine mentioned in the book). I can only be amazed that anyone would look at their investment dollars and think: I know, lets go make money in literature.

The founders of this imprint apparently cold call writers who have never written romatic fiction, or in some cases any fiction at all, and ask them to write for them. (This author, Erika Veurink, is I guess a brand consultant?) Seems an odd approach, and something of a slap in the face for aspiring writers, but there you go.

It compares itself on the cover to NORMAL PEOPLE and YOU, AGAIN. This is very hopeful. It’s not close to their league. However I read it in a single day, while half-dozing in the sun on the Common, eating ice cream, so no complaints here. If this is brainrot, rot away.

CONTRAPPOSTO by Dave Eggars

I spent the first 150 pages of this book mildly bored and the last 250 entranced.   The last 250 I read straight through, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, which raises the worrying idea that the quality of my attention is what is driving my perception of the quality of the book. 

On the plot level, this is a book about a boy and girl who get to know each other in high school and are friends (and sometimes lovers) for the rest of their long lives.  On another level, it is a book about what artistic success means.  The girl is extremely career focused, and is a  big success as a curator.  The boy loves to draw, and while he would like to make a big success as an artist, he just doesn’t want it enough to do the non-drawing leg work this requires, such as e.g., making ‘contacts,’ creating things because they are ‘saleable,’ and etc.  He often does not draw for long periods, and she gets very frustrated with him, especially when he, in her view, ‘checks out’ by moving to Thailand. It was an interesting way of thinking about what your life is really for, and what it’s worth spending your time on.

Rather touchingly, he dedicates the book to those friends of his he’s had for ‘forty or fifty years.’  I’ve passed thirty years with some. I hope I get to fifty with them all.  

CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING by Dorothy Baker

This book comes draped with reviews calling it a modern American classic.  I wasn’t feeling it.  It tells about a woman who goes to her twin sister’s wedding, and once there tries to commit suicide, because she is so unhappy about being left alone.

I don’t know what to tell you, I just found it kind of – meh.  I think I am just tired of books about people being so tortured all the time.  Stop drinking so much and go to therapy for god’s sake. 

SKIN CONTACT by Elisa Faison

Here is a book about a woman who pushes her husband to open their marriage.   It had some funny bits, like: “Her face was smooth and shiny in the right places, like she hadn’t put on any face makeup or like she knew the best makeup to buy.”   But mostly I wasn’t so much into it.  This is partly because I am not sure I can relate to all the negotiating about sex, but more because I couldn’t relate to the whole world.  The main character is in her early thirties, and there is a lot about how she misses her life with her friends in college.  Back then, she says, they were “around each other’s apartments all the time, and it never felt like a special occasion or anything.  We wouldn’t wash our hair before getting together.”  I mean who are these people in their thirties who only go to their friend’s houses on special occasions?  And feel they have to wash their hair first?!  Sounds exceedingly lonely. 

Also strange was how worried she is about getting older.  One thing driving her desire to open her marriage is how she is depressed by no longer being the focus of male interest, now she is so old, which is – wait for it – 32.  Honestly I can only conclude that some womens’ appearance really meant a lot to them in their early life.  I am much older than her and this has never worried me once.  Maybe I was just really ugly in my twenties?

POOL HOUSE by Mary HK Choi

In this book a woman is unhealthily obsessed with her mother.  Her mother meanwhile is unhealthily obsessed with her career in Hollywood.  There is also a surrogate son character who is just generally unhealthy.  I found this to be a quick-moving interesting read, but I can feel myself already forgetting it.  I think it’s because everyone in it is so unendingly miserable.  At some point towards the end there is like a rising arc, where you start to think we might get some kind of evolution or at least insight but then LOL no, how can you be so naïve, there is no escape! Everyone is just as unhealthy as they were before

I just found this dumb.  We eyeroll romances because everyone is so beautiful and happy, which is kind of silly.  This I found a bit silly too, just in the opposite direction, towards ugliness and despair.   

SONS AND DAUGHTERS by Chaim Grade

Here are 700 pages on Jewish life in Poland. The cover tells me it’s considered the last great Yiddish novel. It has a plot, kind of, or more like multiple plots, not all of which overlap. It also has a truly vast array of characters. Particularly I noted how much he liked to describe people, even minor ones. And then I realized we were in the 1930s, and started to wonder: is the description of the people the point of the book?

The introduction tells me this is indeed the case. This poor guy grew up in 1930s Vilna, where there were 70,000 Jews. After the war, there were only a few hundred. He was extremely fortunate to escape, and when he returned I’m sorry to tell you he found his mother and first wife were in the same mass grave. Here he is in a letter to friend:

“I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great that generation that I knew”

It was an odd book. At first it was kind of boring, I kept thinking I was going to quit, but the more I got into it, the more I got into it. I felt kind of bereft once it was over, and really weirdly close to Polish Jews of the1930s. I guess that was his goal. For what it’s worth, they live for me.